I'm in Toronto visiting my mother and getting ready for a major gathering at the University of Toronto to honor my father, so I won't be posting much this week. Still, I couldn't resist trying to describe yesterday's weather.
The day was so cold and blustery day that Con said she'd feared my plane wouldn't be able to land. We were eating dinner, and the winds and snow she described were hard to imagine, or believe in. From her eighth-floor apartment, we looked south over a sunny citiscape towards Lake Ontario, blue in the distance. Above it all, occasional clouds swept across a blue sky. But as I'd left my plane several hours earlier, I'd been buffeted by a crosswind between plane and jetway that had startled me.
Then I got to see one of the sudden storms she said had swept across the city all day.
We were trading news and plans for the week when I interrupted her to say that it looked as if it was raining off to the west. A moment later, the tallest buildings out that way began to look fuzzy. The light dimmed as the cloud covered the sun.
Con turned around. “Yup, that's the beginning,” she said. “Then it would just blow in here—horizontal snow— I tried to get on my bike, but I was afraid I'd be blown over.”
We watched as the buildings to the west gradually disappeared. Stray flakes spun by the window. The lake-front was gone. Then downtown. The snow thickened to the point where even the nearest buildings grew vague.
Five minutes later, the snow let up and the sun came out. “Then there'd be sun,” Con said. “Isn't that weird?”
“Very weird.”
The storm was still moving across the city; we watched as buildings to the east grew dim
The whole show was repeated one more time over dinner. Apparently it had done this on and off all day—and these were the small versions.
“Weird,” Connie said. “Really weird.”
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